Newspaper Archives

Searching History…For Free!

Newspaper archives with their collections of millions of old newspaper articles have always been a treasure trove for historical research. But in pre-digital days, finding the treasure meant going through dusty stacks, scrolling through rolls of microfilm, scanning endless headlines, articles and photo captions, and usually turning up…not very much.

The world has changed! Two and a half centuries of online historical newspaper articles can now be searched with ease. In seconds, you can pull up vintage articles on your grandfather’s grocery store, your great grandparents’ marriage record, wanted notices for Jesse James, advertisements for a Ford Model T, or dramatic stories on the sinking of the Titanic.

Historical researchers quickly become familiar with commercial newspaper archives like Proquest, Readex, Newsbank, and the like, but these are high-priced, institutional subscription services, and not everyone can get ready access to them.

Two accessible and affordable subscription services for vintage newspaper articles are NewspaperArchive and Newspapers.com….both very impressive online newspaper archive collections.

Increasingly, there are digital archives of old newspapers available to everyone at no charge…if you know where to look. That’s what my collection of resources is all about: free historical newspapers on the Internet. Here are those links again.